Over the years, fans have seen Love Is Blind weddings of all kinds — from Lauren and Cameron’s purply pink-hued event and Deepti and Shake’s traditional Hindu nuptials to Danielle and Nick’s sweat-soaked union and Season 4’s outdoor extravaganzas. On the big day, the couples only have one (albeit very important) decision to make: I do or I don’t. But for the team actually planning the wedding, there are countless details to consider before anyone walks down the aisle. Sure, getting engaged to someone sight unseen is a high-stakes gamble, but try orchestrating the perfect day for a group of couples you’ve never even met. 

“My team is designing five weddings, and they’re back-to-back-to-back-to-back,” art director and celebrity event stylist Slomique Hawrylo tells Tudum. “It’s one wedding on a Monday, one wedding on a Tuesday. There’s literally not a breather. I’m doing five weddings in five days. So do I sleep? No.”

So how does it all go down in only two weeks? Below, the wedding planner, who’s overseen every big day of the past two seasons of Love Is Blind, reveals how she and her team pull off the ceremonies from start to finish. 

Cameron Hamilton and Lauren Speed from Season 1 of Love Is Blind.

Step 1: Pop the question, then fill out the questionnaire. 

Every Love Is Blind couple’s journey to the altar begins with a piece of homework. Once the group exits the pods and heads out on vacation, they’re supplied with a questionnaire from Hawrylo’s team to get a sense of their vision for the wedding. “I don’t get to meet my cast at all,” she explains. “What I’m doing is looking at what they write on a piece of paper, and getting the feelings and emotions from that. It’s capturing their style, what they want, a certain color.” 

As Hawrylo puts it, the couples contribute “the cake,” so to speak, by communicating what they want their big day to feel and look like, ranging from “traditional to boho, to modern, to romantic.” She’s responsible for executing their fantasy through the “icing” — or the details that will take their breath away. “I’m just going to provide some sweetness, some elegance, bling and a couple of floral moments.” 

Before actually meeting the couples, Hawrylo and her team rely on Pinterest boards and social media to fill in any gaps. “Just know that as I’m designing these weddings, I am also blind,” she says. “I look at the style of woman they are. How do they dress? Do they have a very boho kind of vibe? Or are they a little bit more glamorous with a beat face, great nails and a fabulous outfit? Then, I know who they are.” That’s when her team of 35 to 40 people kicks into high gear and the work truly begins. Within a matter of days, they must narrow down a mountain of details, including hiring local vendors like florists, designers, bakers and bartenders — all while fielding calls from an increasingly anxious bride and groom “up to the day of the wedding.”

Step 2: Trust the process. 

With more than two decades of experience under her belt, Hawrylo has seen, done and planned it all. But for most of the couples involved, this is their first and hopefully only wedding, so letting go of control isn’t always easy. “100% of the time, the cast doesn’t know they have a celebrity event planner designing their wedding,” she explains. “They just think it’s a random person on the production team and they start to get a little nervous.”

Planning a minimum of five ceremonies at once, while also still making them feel individualized to each couple, is a near-impossible balancing act. Hawrylo and her team evaluate special requests on a “case-by-case” basis, making sure to incorporate personal touches like reserving a seat for a loved one that’s passed away or featuring a color in the bouquet to compliment a bridal gown.

Ultimately, she’s there to bring their dreams to life… within reason. “Every wedding is different,” Hawrylo says. “It’s very important to me that each wedding has its own voice. I want them to feel that I didn’t miss a beat, so I listen to everything that they’re asking me.”

Chelsea Griffin and Kwame Appiah from Season 4 of Love Is Blind.

Step 3: Don’t sweat the small stuff… or the budget. 

Love Is Blind is all about falling in love without ever seeing the other person — and when it comes to the wedding, without seeing a single cent of their own money. That’s right, with all the pressure building up to the big day, the one thing the bride and groom don’t have to worry about is breaking the bank, as all costs are covered. Each season, Hawrylo has a budget for five weddings — should the singles make it down the aisle or not — that she must divide among the group to turn their dream wedding into a reality. 

“I design the same type of weddings I would do for celebrity clients,” Hawrylo says. “I don’t pull back [thinking], ‘Oh, they’re just everyday people.’ It’s not about that for me. What it’s about is, can I give them something new, fresh, breathtaking and a dream?”

In her eyes, the couples are “doing the hard work of trusting a process that is not traditional,” so when it comes to paying for the experience, it’s on the house. But how much does it actually cost? Some of the big ticket items for Season 4 included florals, which ran around $50,000 to $60,000, while securing a tent for the ceremonies ate up almost $120,000 of the overall budget. 

Couples will only take on costs if “there are particular things they really want that I wouldn’t know how to get.” For example, previous cast members paid for particular nail artists, photographers or custom details for their ceremony like monograms, which is “really, really difficult” given the time frame. As for their guests, the season’s budget allows for each couple to invite between 80 to 100 people in total. There’s some wiggle room, depending on the size of the bride and groom’s families or last-minute invites to fellow pod-squad members, but ultimately the venue dictates the size. While it’s of course highly unusual to get a free wedding, the couples will still “go through the same process of limitations for what they can and cannot do” to “make [their dreams] as much a reality as possible.”

Step 4: Prepare for the worst and hope for the best. 

So, about that tent… While each season and city brings its own challenges, nothing has tested Hawrylo and her team more than the Seattle weddings, which she says were the “hardest we’ve done thus far.” The unpredictable weather thew a wrench in their plans after the rain made the “soggy” ground around the venue particularly treacherous for high-heeled guests. 

“We couldn’t get golf cart carts to drive on the grass, because it was too muddy,” Hawrylo recalls. “We literally made the decision 24 hours before to build a whole wooden ramp from the concrete entryway all the way to the tent.”

That, unfortunately, became the least of their problems: 12 hours before one ceremony, a windstorm blew through the venue and “literally almost picked up the entire tent.” The team sprung into action and broke down the wedding from top to bottom, leaving everyone questioning whether hosting the ceremony would be even feasible. 

“Everything that I did the night before was disassembled. I didn’t know what I was walking into in the morning,” she recalls. “When you’re watching the weddings, that’s the reason why it’s 30 degrees, pouring down rain and there’s no walls. But it actually worked out, because it made it that more breathtaking. It was crazy. And we pulled it off.”

Raven Ross and Sikiru “SK” Alagbada from Season 3 of Love Is Blind.

Mitchell Haaseth/Netflix

Step 5: Pivot, pivot, pivot! 

Apart from the weather, the most unpredictable elements are the couples themselves. As soon as Hawrylo gets the green light, she’s planning five weddings that may or may not even happen. When the singles do go their separate ways before wedding, like in Marshall and Jackie’s case, everything is thrown out the window. 

“The flowers are ordered, everything’s ordered and then it becomes, “Oh, no, no, no, it’s not going to happen,’ ” she explains. “So that budget that I allocated could have went to someone else.” Despite the headache, Hawrylo says there’s also a definite “sadness” on her end when she gets the call. “Someone who takes a leap like this, and trusts the process, they want love to win. And a lot of times, as a person that has been doing weddings for so long, I’m still not jaded.”

Of course, getting the couples to the wedding itself is just half the battle. The rest of the ceremony hinges on whether they actually tie the knot, making the reception a major question mark. “What I try to do is make every ceremony breathtakingly gorgeous, but the receptions may not always happen, so I have to make a gamble,” Hawrylo says. 

As Love Is Blind fans are well aware, everything can change at the altar, even for the most seemingly rock solid duos. A ceremony for a particular Season 3 couple still looms large in Hawrylo’s memory. “Everyone thought this couple was just madly, deeply in love,” she says. “I put everything towards this wedding — I mean, a five-tier cake, fireworks, you name it. When the groom said no, my heart just dropped. I was probably almost in tears, because the reception was so over the top. I didn’t miss a freaking detail.”

When the worst does occur, the crew allows the event to “organically” unfold. Over the next 15 to 20 minutes, organized chaos reins at the ceremony as the guests “start to separate, protect and divide” into teams. “You see this unveil right in front of your eyes,” Hawrylo says. Friends and family aren’t forced to leave the venue, as many either take a breather or grab a drink, but the majority aren’t keen to dwell in the tension. “If the bride ends up leaving, her guests leave with them. If the groom ends up leaving, they leave.”

Alexa Lemieux walks down the aisle in Season 3 of Love is Blind.

Step 6: On to the next.

When one love story ends, another needs planning. As one of the most booked and busy event planners in the industry, Hawrylo is always looking to raise the bar and push her creativity for the next ceremony. 

Above all else, planning weddings is a purpose that “supersedes budget, Seattle rain” and everything else. “If they last forever, this is the only wedding that they’re going to have,” Hawrylo says. ‘I take a huge responsibility. It’s not just a job for me, it’s my passion.” At the heart of her work is the belief that Love Is Blind pushes us all to “look deeper” beyond even the most spectacular surface details. “Do I love making things pretty? I do,” she says. “But what I love more is the love that’s behind it. I really just love love, and I think when you love love,  you want people to find it.”